Written Blog
Autumn Canady
2023
My very first idea for this project was some sort of cooking vlog or tutorial as seen on YouTube. I thought of this because I found myself missing the food I used to eat in the states and wanted to recreate a meal I enjoyed a lot which is grits and eggs. Also on social media I come across lots of recipes and cooking videos, so it was an idea that has been on my mind. I created a sketch of a teenager in a cooking apron. Before I create sketches I first go to Pinterest, an app I use to find inspiration. I looked at some character designs of girls and chefs and combined what I saw. I dressed the character in the exact clothes I was wearing at the time which was a pullover and leggings. Even though the character is not me directly I used myself as reference for some of the features. I wanted to keep everything fairly simplistic so that it would be easy to model and rig. After I was satisfied with the initial sketch I refined some more and added some details such as the way the hair would be shaped and what colors I’d like different parts of her design to be. Character design class last semester taught me that a successful character design can be defined by how recognizable its silhouette is. The example used in class was spongebob, most when shown a black silhouette of spongebob would immediately be able to name him. In order to make the colors mesh well together I used procreate’s color balance feature and made adjustments until I was happy. Next, I created sketches of her side and back profile so I could use it as reference while I modeled. In the end I named this character Sydney. I then typed up a full script of the short film, adding notes when I wanted the character to make a specific expression or say something in a certain way. This entire time I was writing the script with someone from home in mind who said she’d be happy to voice the character as she is an acting major. When I finished the script I got up and recorded myself acting out the scene as dramatically as I could use it for reference and to get an idea of what the run time would be. The video ended up being about 35 seconds so it fit perfectly. 

I emailed the girl who was playing my character about recording lines and she told me she was unfortunately no longer available. I had then decided I would just voice the character myself and began modeling. I took a short break on working on my film and began working on the character and creature assignment. The plan was always to animate those things first so I could learn how to animate and rig on maya. Through those exercises I came into many problems. One being that I was not saving my progress properly so I had lost an entire sequence and had to start again. Another being that my animations were not rendering correctly when I played back the video a red screen popped up with “foreign source” in the middle. I tried to get rid of it but ultimately just recorded my animations unrendered with my phone. I also modeled a character with the intention of using it for the assignment but I was really confused on how to rig it. (This is after the fact, but now having rigged the short film character I know what I did wrong). With this failure in mind I returned to my film a bit more cautious on how to proceed. I decided to scrap the character I designed and go for a different, more simplified design. I also decided that my character was not going to talk and that I would narrate her actions. That way the story is nearly the same but there will be less work on my end trying to animate the mouth and expressions. At this point I have the new character drawn as well as the side, and back profiles. Now I am going to create a tailored script using bits of the one I made before and then I will record myself again. The plan after that is to model the new character. I already modeled the kitchen set earlier so I will just use that. 

Today I have finished modeling my character. This took about 3 hours to complete. I started by importing my reference drawing into Maya as a plane and then changing the perspective in order to “trace” shapes over it. I then deleted half the shape and continued to model the half I had left and refine it. When I was finished I used the mirror feature in Maya to duplicate my model over the x axis, this way the model is symmetrical. Then I grouped all the modeled objects into one. Next I rigged my character. I designed a character for the character and creature project but had a lot of trouble rigging it and ended up abandoning the design. This time was a lot easier since I simplified my design and did some research and how to use the rig feature on Maya. I also took a picture of a developed skeleton rig on my phone and used it as reference when creating and moving around joints. My character mainly needs to walk and turn its head for the animation. After some testing I was able to get the model to move in a way that I was satisfied with. I have yet to modify the script because I wanted to go ahead and model the character first. Now that that is out of the way, everything else should be a downhill slope. The character and creature assignment also taught me how to use keyframes and time out movements correctly, even though some of my short animations turned out wonky I know what to improve upon for the future. 

Redoing the script was way easier than I thought. The story progression was the same I just switched out the character and who's talking, it took about 10 mins to rewrite it. I then filmed a voice over of myself reciting the script, playing the narrator and then used the VoiceOver to video myself acting out the character once again to use as reference. 

I decided to go back and refine my kitchen model by adding a UV design. I briefly remembered how to use UVs from my 3D Modeling class from last semester. Before all my objects just had various colored textures using Arnold but I wanted the wall to be something more unique. It would also be fairly easy to UV since it was a square shape. I went into ProCreate and made a quick flower doodle pattern. I then went into the UV editor and created a png outline file so I could use it as a reference for my pattern. I airdropped the png file to my IPad and moved my pattern around to fit the UV skeleton. When I was done I sent the pattern back to my computer and created a new texture and set the color to file and added it in. I am happy with the way the wall turned out, it pops out around all the plain colors. All I have to do now is animate and edit the short film. I am a little worried about render time since the time it took to render those short animations for the other assignment was a bit long. Hopefully my computer can handle it.


I have begun animating. I calculated how many seconds my film was using the video I took of myself. It ended up being 42 seconds, because I am animating with 24 fps. I multiplied 24 by 42 to set the frames. Every 24 frames was a second so every second was a key pose. I used my video and put in 42 key poses. The model is moving pretty okay with the rigs but there was some workaround, for example, whenever I move the arm any way the character’s ear also moves, I am not sure how to change this but it is not that big of a deal since the character is a bunny I can count it as secondary movement. My bluetooth mouse went dead about halfway through this process so I had to switch to my keypad which slowed things down a bit but it was fine since I’ve used Maya with my keypad before. After I made my 42 key poses I played the animation through to see how it looked. The character moved a little strangely and unexpectedly I had to go back and move some things around again. Once I was okay with what I had, I moved to making in between or transition poses. For this I pulled out my animation book for reference so I could incorporate some principles of animations, especially reaction and squash stretch. At this point I realized I was drawing a lot of inspiration from a children’s show I used to watch a long time ago called Pocoyo. He was a kid that went on different adventures and listened to the narrator for guidance. His character design was also pretty clay like and he lived in a bright white void. Even though the reference wasn’t intentional I now see that I was subconsciously drawing a lot from that show. I decided to pull up some clips to see how the characters move and if I could try and improve the way mine did. In Pocoyo the characters are very reactive to the narrator so I exaggerated mine as much as I could but again the rig isn’t perfect so if I moved things too much the character would lose its anatomy. The in-between process took way longer than I thought it would, it was about another 4 hours of work. I continued tweaking what I had until it looked right. I wanted to go into after effects or premiere and add some overlay animations but I might do that after the fact.  

I started to render the short but I noticed that it was rendering out with some sort of grain so I paused it and looked to YouTube to fix it. I just had to restart the process and with the new settings it should look better. Rendering will probably be the longest step of all I’m guessing. Next I will have to put the TIFF files into Adobe Media Encoder in order to put them all together into an MP4 file. Last time I did this I kept getting foreign file errors about half way through then the animation continued. If that happens this time I will try to put the TIFF files into Premiere Pro or just look up other ways to put them together and set it to the right time. After that is complete I just need to edit my voiceover onto the film and add an end card. If I have time I still want to add some sound effects and overlays.

Right now the film is still rendering and my computer’s fan kicked on, I don’t want to leave it on overnight so I am going to try to pause it and continue the next day. I knew it would take a while and take a lot of energy. It would have been better to start everything earlier but I completely scrapped what I had. 

I tried to resume the rendering but I don’t think I did it correctly because it is making me start over. I had to move my flight up for personal reasons so I will be leaving tonight, if it is not fully rendered I will have to try again at home. At home I have an actual computer so it should work more efficiently. As of right now it is not finished so I will turn in the written portion of the assignment and turn the film in as soon as I can. In the project I’ve added my script and character model as well as the setting I made for it.